‘We went to Europe for a while. Into North Africa, but then back to Spain and Italy. Elisabeth’s – her faith – she wanted to spend time in Italy, immersed . . . We spent a lot of time in religious accommodation, in hostels. We walked to Santiago de Compostela. We crossed borders so many times.’
‘Did you?’ she said, her surprise audible.
‘Yes,’ he said steadily. ‘Italy was the loveliest. Near Ravenna. I can see,’ he said, ‘that I appear to you like a cautious, reserved pedagogue – a crashing bore, even. You had your life in London and elsewhere, your writing, your family. But I hoped for some little remnant of your – esteem.’
‘Oh – no. No.’ She smiled. ‘Tell me more about what happened.’
‘I think I was a chillier soul when you knew me,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ she said, hesitating. ‘Why?’
‘I didn’t know – didn’t know what to do,’ he said, twisting his head self-consciously.
‘Tell me. More.’
‘Privacy was all I understood. By the time I realised I was in a ridiculous institution, it was too late, and I experienced a kind of giving up –’ He paused, his mouth twitching with apparent pain.
‘How?’
‘There were tensions between Elisabeth and I about staying, rather than returning to Dorset, but in the end we remained there. And then you came in. You – for all the events that followed, for all the damage . . . you, young though you were, you gave me some sense that I could be a living person rather than a shell.’
‘Did I?’ said Cecilia with a tone of disbelief.
He turned away. He looked at the ground to speak. ‘I don’t think anyone had ever asked me so many questions –’
‘The tip of the iceberg!’
‘Well. I responded to all that. And you were kind to me, you know, in a funny way,’ he said, speaking rapidly as though he wished to explain himself. ‘You brought me things, looked after my somewhat damaged soul, though I’m sure you didn’t know it. I’ve wanted to say all this to you for a long time. And then I missed you terribly.’
Did you? Did you? . . . Thank you, she wanted to say. ‘I was young flesh. No challenge,’ she said instead. She winced at her own words.
He stared at her, then turned and walked on.
She caught up with him.
‘I regret it. It was deeply wrong. In a way, I was taking advantage of an opportunity. Of – timing. Of you. But I also had feelings for you,’ he said stiffly.
‘OK,’ said Cecilia, her mouth opening.
‘I could be accused of being some thoughtless cad, but it was never without care or distress – or regret.’
Her mobile rang in her bag, vibrating with Ari’s ringtone.
Dora waited still. She had told Elisabeth not to visit, and Elisabeth, her surprise readable only in her pause, had agreed with a gelid detachment. She did not ring, and she would not ring, Dora knew. After perhaps two weeks, three weeks, she may, piqued and almost impatiently roused, appear in Dora’s garden; but too much suffering would have occurred in the interim, and Dora knew through years of experience that it was not worth keeping her distance merely for the sake of pride. Pride was a subject she thought about frequently.
Instead, Katya came, with her usual self-possession, and at her own instigation found all Dora’s shoes to polish and banged and brushed away old mud, her hair wobbling with her movements in the air. Dora watched her. Her freckles gave colour to her narrow face, the effect like cinnamon and milk, a pale gold that matched her eyes.
‘I’m feeling a little better today,’ said Dora, smiling, standing in her cottage door with her old striped apron.
She looked at the hill beyond the thatch of Wind Tor House and a vivid image of two decades before came to her.
The phone rang. It was not Elisabeth.
‘I need to take this call,’ said Cecilia to James, and she walked away from the river towards a hazel copse where the whispering of leaves enclosed her in what seemed to be silence, her heart racing with guilt as she heard Ari’s voice. Her own voice was light and over-enthusiastic as they discussed practical matters, daughters and work. She could hear traffic, all the tangles of his breath and the amplifications of his mouth close to the phone.
‘Where are you?’ he asked.
‘Where am I?’ she said, and she looked up at the river foliage arching, the plates of cow parsley, cattle moving in slow motion on the field beyond and James Dahl disappearing into shade as though he had never existed other than in her memory.
‘Where are you?’
‘I’m here near the school, by the river. I’m waiting for Romy; she’s sculpting,’ she said.
James had walked ahead. He was pacing a little further downstream.
‘How did you meet your wife?’ said Cecilia, without preface. ‘There are things I’ve always wanted to know.’
‘Oh,’ he said.
‘I must go soon,’ she said. She recognised his watch, his father’s watch.
‘It’s many years since this . . . since I talked of this.’ The canopy of trees swallowed him temporarily in shadow. ‘She was – she had thought of being a nun.’
‘Oh my God!’ said Cecilia, laughing for some time. ‘Elisabeth Dahl as nun!’
‘She had been brought up very strictly in the Anglican Church. It was only later that she turned towards the Catholic faith.’
‘I see,’ said Cecilia warily.
‘She was at a last dance, so she thought. A quaint, supervised dance for girls living in this kind of boarding house in Kensington. The Girls of Slender Means – very much like that. And I was there, training as a teacher nearby. I had been invited with a group of friends, and Elisabeth was standing alone in a corner. And I started to talk to her.’
‘And?’
‘And I danced with her.’
‘How –’ said Cecilia.
‘How what?’ he said gently.
‘How romantic.’
‘Yes.’
Cecilia paused. She found, to her consternation, that she was blushing.
‘And now. Does she look after you? Interest you?’
‘She is – good to me. We are very happy.’
Cecilia began to laugh again, unable to stop herself, becoming embarrassed. Her eyes moistened. ‘Are you?’ she said.
‘Well . . .’ he said. He coughed.
‘Are you happy?’
‘We are . . . contented.’
‘Doesn’t she have her – dalliances?’
‘Cecilia,’ he said.
‘Well?’ Her mouth straightened. ‘Well I’m very happy you’re so domestically fulfilled.’
‘Oh Cecilia,’ he said. He sighed. ‘We make our choices.’
‘I know,’ she said, and, no longer laughing, she looked up at him and nodded. ‘I know.’
‘Tell me about your relationship with –’
‘Oh no,’ interrupted Cecilia defensively.
‘– with Dora.’
‘Oh,’ said Cecilia. She paused. ‘Elis –’
‘No. Dora.’
‘Dora,’ she said impatiently. ‘Oh. I – I wish to have a relationship with her, as you know. But to this day we can’t really talk without it being there, because she knows – I’m a woman without my child. I’m like all those women in documentaries who gave up their babies in the Sixties: haunted. It never goes.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know.’
‘I think – I think you do. I –’ She swallowed. ‘I hadn’t realised for some time that Dora had organised this entirely outside the system. In the early days, I used to walk away from any discussion of adoption because I’d instantly panic, start breaking down, so I simply didn’t know –’
‘That could easily happen. I’d have no real idea what the – the procedures would be.’
‘Nor did I. I thought you gave up your baby, and that was it. Then you went mad.’
He took her arm for a moment and guided her through a clump of old bramble on the path, though
she stiffened. She looked at the river driving its glittering angles as she talked to him, and felt the strange release of it, of words she had said to no one but Diana in fragments over the years. It soothed her to explain to someone, even to him.
‘Why didn’t you contact me?’
‘I thought it wasn’t my place,’ he said. He looked at her directly in the eyes; she felt a glitter of old awareness, embarrassment, in looking straight at him. ‘I’d already caused you enough disruption,’ he said eventually. ‘Though of course I had no idea how much.’
She was silent. Perplexity crossed her face.
‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘It was simply not allowable, not done – not wise. Even there. It seemed anything went – but not that. Of course an establishment can’t employ teachers who . . . Though in fact there were, had been instances over the years, I came to know, the longer I taught there –’
‘Who?’ said Cecilia instantly.
‘Oh, I’ll recall and report. Some time. But it . . . was, is, never advisable. Of course.’ He coughed.
The water snaked as they passed with the speckled shiftings of stones beneath a slow yellow. Cecilia soundlessly turned and began to walk back. ‘Will you meet me another time?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Next Monday.’
Romy was not at the school. A note was tacked to the studio door, stating that the sculpture society had taken a short trip to Danver Sands to observe wave formations and may be a little late returning, the paper signed in a large, careless fashion by Elisabeth Dahl. ‘Fuck Elisabeth Dahl,’ Cecilia murmured, and glanced at her watch. She walked fast towards the car, hoping that if she drove to Danver Sands now she might meet the minibus on its return to the school.
She parked, turned a corner beyond the fence lining the fields that led to the beach, walked down a slope beneath a windless sky, and came upon them: girls in the waves.
Girls in dark-blue uniforms ran and rushed with the movement of the sea. They bobbed and gathered, surged with the waves until they came in as one, water stained black, their hair dragging behind them as they were carried in and thrown on to the sand. They were part of the sea, galloping together, climbing back in, screaming soundlessly.
‘Romy!’ Cecilia cried. But no one heard. There on the beach stood Elisabeth.
The girls in their uniforms looked like figureheads, crests becoming horses, sodden and breathless, hair streaking mouths, faces wet with foam as they reared and plunged. Cecilia stood and watched with her lips parted. The self-contained Romy stormed through the swell, wild-eyed. Girls clumped and gripped and pulled one another under, emerging choking, laughing, battered by the movement. Elisabeth, tiny and still, stood in front of them and watched.
These girls love her, thought Cecilia. My lover was in love with her. In a corner of her mind, something formed. My mother was in love with her. The idea seemed to bloom at her as a vivid certainty, then disappear.
On the return journey, the car reeked of seaweed and sand, and Romy’s mobile kept beeping with texts. ‘How –? How did that happen?’ Cecilia asked eventually, and Romy told her between gulping breaths and collapses into laughter that they had talked about the shape of the waves in detail until Elisabeth had said, ‘Go in then. Go in and feel them.’ One girl could hardly swim but she followed the others. Her mother would complain to the school if she knew, she said, so she wouldn’t tell her.
Katya was in the field in front of the house. Cecilia parked the car and hurried a shivering Romy to the garden path, but Katya had already slipped down to the river and only a section of her back was visible, her hair waving. She turned and paused momentarily, and Cecilia, catching a glimpse of her face, thought with a sudden acceleration to her heartbeat, Is this my daughter? Was it she who hid at night? The thought melted.
Twenty-five
April
‘Where’s Izzie?’ said Cecilia.
Ruth shook her head. She tapped seven times under the kitchen table. She saw the colours in the air. A solitary apple that she had been noticing in the fruit bowl was losing its freshness as it contracted unevenly with age, and she worried about who, if any, its fruit friends were. Is it autochthonous? she wondered. That was her safety word. If something was autochthonous, it was protected.
She gouged her nails into the surface of the table. Cecilia noticed her and was reminded of herself, the old soft pine sedimented with children’s pasts. She saw again that Ruth was suffering and pity clutched at her and sent a trail of uneasiness through her that she couldn’t shake off as she wondered, as she so often wondered, how to help. She was problematically shy. An educational psychologist in London had made little progress; neither had her teachers, Ari or she herself, despite her hope that country life would be beneficial. Nightly, she slipped into Ruth’s room and talked to her quietly, stroking her forehead, willing her words to be heard in the passage between consciousness and sleep.
Did I get this sweet child as my punishment? she wondered. Is she disturbed because she knows, somewhere, about the missing one I mourn? Does Mara take up the space in my mind?
And she resolved, as she had resolved before, to love only Ruth and Izzie and Romy. She banished the ghost.
Izzie then burst into the kitchen, reeking of a confusion of elements and substances: wind, woodsmoke and alcohol.
‘You’re here,’ said Cecilia. She breathed slowly. ‘You’ve been on the moor.’
‘Mm hmmm,’ said Izzie. Her nails were covered in chipped silver varnish. She gaped at Romy. ‘Why’re you in your dressing gown? Why’s your hair wet? You look like a housewife about to shag the milkman.’
‘Why?’ said Cecilia. ‘You said you would look after Ruth.’
‘She’s cool. Dors is up the garden. So’s her weirdo servant.’
‘You said you were cooking beans for supper. Where is he?’
‘He –’ said Izzie. ‘I don’t know, Ma.’
‘You are fifteen,’ Cecilia said, old alarm gripping her as she looked at Izzie in all her youth.
Izzie reached out, squinting, and grabbed an apple.
Ruth watched her teeth: they had become horse teeth chomping and sinking into skin.
‘Eurgh,’ said Izzie.
The abandoned ageing apple rocked on the table displaying its flesh wound. Ruth sent it blessings and medicine in vibrations through the air. Everything is lost, she thought.
In the morning, Dora woke early after a night of deep sleep, satisfied at her continued silence towards Elisabeth, but so very solitary in the light that bounded against her walls.
This longing for Elisabeth would hurry her death, she thought suddenly, tears springing to her eyes and humiliating her. She blinked. The pain of wanting Elisabeth – banished through willpower; returning with vicious teeth – was brutal. She would, would, would, continue the journey away. She promised it to herself as a brand of insurance against death. If she kept herself from this person, the cells would not metastasise.
She looked out of the slip of a window facing Corndon Tor and saw the boy arrive outside. It was the first time Izzie had brought him so close to the house in daylight, though she had been aware of his van sometimes, a vehicle belonging to a Widecombe garden centre, parking in the first light of the morning: early, early, when the cows were tossing heads and shouting at Dockden Farm and the nettles were astringent with dew.
He walked along scuffing stones. In the chill tinged with gold, the flecks of dirt were just visible or imaginable in the peaks of his hair as she watched him. She caught one glimpse of his face and she softened because he looked disquietingly thin and paler than she had remembered. Izzie walked silently beside him, eyeliner smeared, her arm around his waist.
Later in the morning, Izzie took the bus to school, attended registration and first lessons, then wandered the back route over a nettle-choked railway bridge to the market square in town. She thumped Dan’s shoulder in greeting as he stood at his stall subtly mimicking his customers’ nodding speech and weig
hing up the carrots he had bought in bulk from the large Asda outside Plymouth before spending happy minutes with Izzie immersing them in mud. They added snails to the boxes alongside a display of leafy carrot tops from the garden centre, a rabbit imported on one occasion in a supplementary show of authenticity. He had produced a printout explaining how the carrots were organically produced on his smallholding in accordance with the moon’s phases. Izzie doodled badly drawn crescents and stars on the margins.
In his guise as artisan gardener, Dan nodded earnestly with his captive clientele while Izzie fought back burps of laughter and silently admired. She loved his shoulders. She reeled at his mockery. Mid-conversation, he turned with a conspiratorial smile for her. He had fashioned bowls from straw and horse dung which Izzie baked in the slow oven of the Aga. ‘They look like shit; they are shit; but we’ll call them Aboriginal,’ said Dan, whose stock of carrots, potatoes and cheap cheese disguised with walnuts or wrapped in leaves was bringing in a healthy profit. He sold random pieces of rock as healing crystals, employing a series of delicately parodic gestures as he discussed their ‘properties’. One week he invented a moorland enclosed community which produced objects of wood and clay, eliciting questions and cynical comments, yet still a handful of these knobs and lumps and non-functioning instruments were purchased. On occasion, he wore a sack as an apron or a borrowed medieval outfit with no sign of embarrassment, while Izzie snorted behind him. A regular buyer lost faith, held a carrot up to the sun to examine it, and threatened Dan with a fight.
After visits to a pub off a sharp slant of track behind Widecombe, where a vicious local beer was served beyond closing time to old men who sat silently with their sheepdogs but greeted Dan with handclasps, he was more leisurely and affectionate with her. He curled up against her in her bedroom and they kissed and chatted, and he told her solemnly that she must do her schoolwork.
‘Or you’ll end up like me,’ he said.
‘How?’
‘A wazzock.’
She giggled. ‘Didn’t you go to university?’ she said.
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